Bulletin Board Ideas & Designs for School, Office and Your Room

Category: Thanksgiving Bulletin Board

Thanksgiving bulletin board ideas can be very creative and interesting to bring fun and meanwhile remind us to be grateful in our everyday lives. Some great ideas include the turkey themed bulletin board as well as the tree of thanks.

The fall season and the Thanksgiving holiday season both occur near the beginning of each school year. Your first bulletin board of the year often reflects one or both of these themes. Combining the season and holiday with the classroom events can make for a creative addition to your classroom.

For a traditional Thanksgiving bulletin board with a twist, consider making thankful turkeys. Use the old stand-by turkey cut out pattern with attachable feathers in different colours. Let the students write one thing they are thankful for on each of their turkey’s feathers. Let the students hang the turkeys and share with the class. Alternatively, you may let the students create a thankful cornucopia. Let each one cut out several fruit or vegetables and write their wishes or what they are thankful for on each. Your cornucopia opening will need to be large to fit all the fruit and vegetables, so plan accordingly.

Thanksgiving brings lessons about the Pilgrims and their first year in the New World. Let your students research the way of life the Pilgrims lived. Let them then discuss items the early settlers lived without that they enjoy daily. These items might include heat and air conditioning, stoves, microwaves, manufactured housing, washing machines or even cars. Limit the items to what the students find to be necessities. Let the students find pictures or draw pictures of these items and display them on a board entitled “Then and now.”

You may make a large turkey out of two brown circles, and paste on the bulletin board. Add “feathers” to the back of the turkey by cutting them out of coloured paper. Before pasting them to the turkey, pass them out to children and ask them to write what they are thankful for. Better yet, provide a basket of feathers and markers on a table near the board. As children pass by, they can stop and write down their thanks. Then, they can pin them to the board with a push pin.

It may be incorrect to portray Pilgrims and Native Americans as best buddies, but a bulletin board that demonstrates how the natives helped the Pilgrims on the first Thanksgiving provides a truthful and age-appropriate theme. Light blue paper covers the upper half of the bulletin board, and white paper covers the lower half for a snowy outdoor theme. A cardboard cut-out of a cartoon Native American holding out a basket of corn to a cartoon Pilgrim decorates the middle of the board.

Remind students about things for which they are grateful by creating a Thanksgiving bulletin board with a “Tree of Thanks” theme. Light blue paper covers the upper half of the board, and green paper covers the lower half for an outdoor look. A leafless, tall, brown paper tree decorates the middle of the board. Children cut leaves from coloured paper and write something they are grateful for. The leaves cover the bare tree branches to provide an autumn style.

Thanksgiving bulletin board ideas are able to instil the great moral values of thanksgiving while creating a nice and exciting learning experience or environment to the students. In creating this kind of bulletin board, you can always make use of your own creativity in making the bulletin board as attractive as possible.

Bulletin boards are helpful for educators to change the mood and feeling among students in the hallways and in classrooms at schools, welcome in a new season and create a sometimes festive atmosphere. Bulletin boards during Thanksgiving signal fall and the coming Christmas holidays and can illustrate this in a number of ways.

Set your Thanksgiving bulletin board like a Thanksgiving table. Ask students to research different recipes of different dishes for Thanksgiving and then post them in different places along the bulletin board, along with pictures of these dishes. They should also have researched the histories of where these dishes came from and why they are traditional dishes for Thanksgiving, educating others about why we eat what we eat every Thanksgiving and if the food has any historical significance.

Put up a map of North America and Europe on the bulletin board and allow students to chart where they are traveling to, if anywhere, for Thanksgiving. Record these distances in a number of miles for the entire trip and the amount of time it will take to go on that trip. Compare these figure to the amount of time it took for pilgrims to go from Europe to America to have the very first Thanksgiving. This bulletin board will explore how much time has changed over the past centuries and how we should be thankful that we don’t have it as hard as the Pilgrims had it.

Create a bulletin board exploring the history of the first Thanksgiving, looking at how the pilgrims acquired all the foods for their first Thanksgiving, what they ate and who was present. This will also explore their relationship with the Native Americans and the hardships the pilgrims had to deal with on that first Thanksgiving Day. This will highlight the fact that despite the struggle of these first Americans, they still celebrated Thanksgiving, helping them to thrive and make our country what it is today.

You can also create a large cornucopia out of bulletin board or construction paper and staple to a paper-covered bulletin board. Provide each student with a piece of construction paper cut in the shape of different fruits. Have each one write on their piece of paper what it is that they are most grateful for. Then pin or staple each one inside and trailing out of the cornucopia. Entitle the bulletin board, “We are Thankful For.”

Fall leaves make colourful and festive bulletin board borders. Real fall leaves will quickly lose their colour and become crunchy, though, so you might want to try artificial leaves sold at craft stores. They look realistic, are durable and long-lasting. They are also flexible, so they can easily overlap the metal frame of the bulletin board while being attached to the cork area. Overlap the leaves slightly as you attach them to the edge of the board so no bare spots are visible.